Beyond the Pale

Most accounts of the Taiwan Miracle are ahistorical, establishing as their baseline the years immediately following the Second World War. ¹ The intensive Allied bombing that destroyed much of Taiwan’s industrial and transportation infrastructure resulted in a postwar period of economic devastation (Selya 1974). Furthermore, the agrarian character of Taiwanese society of poor small-holding family farms was the legacy of fifty years of Japanese colonial rule, from 1895 to 1945 (Barclay 1954). The period of stasis under the Japanese and the years immediately following the Second World War contrast sharply with the dynamism of the later postwar period, and of the period before the Japanese occupation. Constructing a baseline with the arrival of the Nationalists in 1948 distorts the picture of Taiwan’s development, in which a sleepy agrarianism explodes into industrial vigor under the beneficence of the Nationalist government (Gates 1996). Moving the baseline back into history provides a new perspective on Taiwan’s development, connecting it to an earlier, formative period in the nation’s history. In this chapter, I examine the development of Taiwan’s social structure—and the tensions inherent in this structure—which I argue forms the basis of its postwar indigenous dynamic. In the following chapter, I will examine local religion as a locus of historical memory (Sangren 1987), wherein the unresolved contradictions of the past were transformed into religious practice and paraphernalia. The fierce countenance of the gods both evoked Taiwan’s terrible past and empowered the Taiwanese as they faced a rapidly changing and uncertain future.